Could climate change cause more lightning — and spark more wildfires?

Lightning could strike in Canada more often due to the effects of climate change — and amid concerns of drought, that could also mean more dry lightning and wildfires. 

Heat is a factor for lightning, but how could rising global temperatures influence the amount of lightning Alberta gets?

Temperatures soared last year: experts say the average global temperature was 1.48 C warmer than the pre-industrial era.

According to a 2014 study published in Science, lightning strikes are expected to increase about 12 per cent for every degree the global average temperature increases.

The study looked at the rate of lightning in the Great Plains of the United States, east of the Rockies — where the rate of lightning was already high. 

Co-author David Romps says two factors influence how much lightning a region gets: precipitation and how much energy there is in the atmosphere, also known as convective available potential energy (CAPE).

On a warm day, hot air rises, creating an updraft. When it collides with cool air higher in the sky, a cumulonimbus — or, thundercloud — could form. 

CAPE measures how strong that updraft is, and the general instability in the atmosphere. The higher the instability, the more likely a thunderstorm will roll in.

Romps' team used climate models to determine how much CAPE would be found in the atmosphere in the years to come. 

"As you look at those models, as they run out to the end of the century towards 2100, we see that CAPE… increases pretty dramatically," said Romps, a professor in the department of earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley. 

"That increase in CAPE is driving our expectation that we would get an increase in lightning."

That suggests Alberta — an area already prone to thunderstorms — could see lightning more often as temperatures continue to climb.

Experts say the wildfire that recently ripped through Jasper, Alta., was likely caused by lightning. So, could what happened there become a more common occurrence? 

Parks Canada does not track the amount of lightning in Jasper National Park. But according to Environment and Climate Change Canada, the town of Hinton, just east of the park's gate, averaged 40.2 days with lightning per year, from 1999 to 2018.